Remembrance (Revised)

I'm grateful for having had the Garden of Remembrance so close to St. Paul's & that physical act of remembrance every year as we walked down & I stood there, hearing the familiar words of the service & the Last Post play out. Grateful for the minute's silence carried out in schools year after year, to stop and pause and give thanks and honour the dead. Reflecting this morning and thinking how two years will bring us to a hundred years since the start of WWI. As we move further away from World War history, losing men like Harry Patch who stood for the sacrifices of his generation, it seems more imperative than ever to speak of what happened so that we, the people of the present, do not forget.

   There's an absence of poppies here. American remembers and honours differently. I began to write a comparison between the two days, Remembrance Day & Veterans Day, thinking over the experiences of war and the similarities in remembering & honouring the dead.
  However after arriving at the theatre, I found on the noticeboard a page of wee stars & stripes stickers and an explanatory notice defining the day itself. I guess it's not just me who gets it confused then.
   Turns out poppies are worn for Memorial Day in May- to remember & honour those who died in service. Veterans Day, on the other hand, is there as recognition for all who have served, be it in wartime or peacetime & to acknowledge that to the living. Interesting... America would do it differently, I suppose. Dad & I have talked on this before - America's desire to salute & applaud the military: from hometown crowds to discounts in stores. Our conclusion led us back to the Seventies, redressing the wrongs done to American servicemen in & after Vietnam.
  It remains a fact quite close to home for the Rep though: our second lead guy, Scotty has only recently returned from Afghanistan. It was on his bucket list to join the Navy so he was there under an Individual Augmentee Deployment, now discharged from service. He's such a darling; I'm glad to have met him & now be working with him. He always greets me with a hug & a kiss & thanks (or a high-five with a James Bond/Cockney accent depending on the occasion & timing of the show.) His part in Bootleg Hamlet was the well-played entrance of Fortinbras, dressed in fatigues & a Captain Planet t-shirt to wolf-whistles & cheers from the local crowd. He certainly hyped that role up but other than that in real terms, we don't really ask. I'm certainly thankful then for his safe return.

What I wrote prior, on remembrance: 

.... For them, there's the War of Independence & also, thinking on Monument, a ready focus on sacrifices of the Civil War. From there, what seems like a fast forward to remembering recent history fought & enacted in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq...
   For us with a much older history (our 'civil war' being fought back in 1455), I think we recall the World Wars much more vividly. Partially due to being European so being involved & implicated from the start, as well as the immediate impact of the two Wars on the homeland. Conscription, rationing, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, Hitler's steady occupation across the Continent. 
  It may have been the same war fought by England & her allies on the other side of the Atlantic but sometimes our respective theatres of war & experiences appear very distinct.